Chapter 25
God save me from idiots!
As Charlotte huffed her way across the room and clambered into bed, it struck her that perhaps her prayer wasn’t specific enough.
God save me from men!
Why did gentlemen consider liquor somehow manly?
Both Warrick and Belozersky had gotten sloshed on self-righteousness as much as vodka, even as they began to sweat alcohol and behave like a pair of orangutans.
After half a bottle of vodka, the prince had spent the rest of the night speaking only in Russian and gesticulating wildly.
At one point, Charlotte suspected he was reciting poetry, and later his eyes went heavy and she was fairly certain that he had said something filthy, but she’d stopped trying to understand him when he scooped up his poor borzoi and danced her mournfully around the room.
Warrick was a colder, steelier kind of drunk. When the bottle was empty, he sat at the table, looking murderous but talking little, until it came time to retire to the drawing room.
“No.” He had shaken his head when Lord Lysander offered to help haul him from his seat. “They got me on the last charge, Lysander. Go on without me! Save yourself, brother!”
Nothing they said had convinced Warrick that he wasn’t dying, so Marby, Lord Lysander, and two of the strongest footmen had had to lift up his chair and carry him up to his bedchamber, promising to administer last rites.
Charlotte shot a withering glare at the thin wall separating their two rooms.
Time was flying by, each day faster than the last, and at summer’s end she had to pay her mother’s debt and choose a husband or else. Yet here she was, lying in bed and thinking about Warrick of all people.
Stop it! she told herself firmly, but her mind was a weasel and it twisted and squirmed back to its favorite topic. She thwacked her pillow until it puffed up high, and yet it still felt as lumpy as a coal scuttle.
Oh bollocks!
How could she moon over that man? He’d dropped her like a rock three years ago, making it as clear as the glassy waters of the Medway that he wanted nothing to do with her.
And yet—sometimes she caught him staring with the oddest expression, his eyes overheated and that wretchedly talented mouth practically panting at her, but with such sadness on his face.
Charlotte’s pillow was too hot, so she flipped it to the cooler side, but it was no use. Sleep was a weasel, too, dashing close and then slipping out of reach again.
Blast it, she ought to be tossing and turning for the prince.
Certainly, he was one of the most promising of her suitors.
His mouth was almost unnervingly excellent, as if God had wondered what would happen if he took a man’s chiseled face and slapped a pair of courtesan’s lips on it.
She ought to be yearning for him, or at least returning the heavy-lidded glances he shot at her.
And she would!
First thing tomorrow.
A crash shook the walls, and Charlotte scrambled out of bed and onto her feet.
The noise had come from Warrick’s room, but she didn’t hear the stream of curses she’d expect from a drunk man falling out of bed.
Instead, she heard… nothing?
“Your Grace?” she called tentatively.
Charlotte tiptoed closer to the wall between their rooms, listening intently. She pressed her ear up against the hand-painted silk wallpaper but was greeted only by the creaks of an old house settling into its bones.
“Your Grace?” she called again.
Her own voice echoed back at her.
She knocked on the wall. “Your Grace? Can you hear me?”
Still nothing.
Charlotte pounded against the plaster. “Warrick! Warrick, you great ape! Have you done yourself an injury?”
But all she heard was her own rapid breathing.
Charlotte knew a great many foul words and she uttered most of them as she reached for the dressing gown laid out for her, then reconsidered and reached into the back of her wardrobe for an infinitely more fetching one of pink silk lustring with enormous rosettes sewed round the hem.
She muttered even more as she wrapped herself up, checked that her hair was semi-contained or at least not doing something unspeakable, and opened the door to peek out into the hallway.
This is a bad idea, her conscience intoned.
Which Charlotte had to admit was true. She was already in the midst of one scandal, and seemed ill-advised to court another by sneaking into a man’s bedchamber in the middle of the night.
On the other hand, what if Warrick was injured?
Her conscience laughed darkly. The man’s a war hero. Chances are he can survive a featherbed.
An excellent point, but Charlotte’s feet ignored it and sneaked her off down the corridor. Her hands did one worse and opened his door, which meant she had no choice but to thrust herself inside his bedchamber.
“Warrick!” Charlotte whispered into the darkness. “Warrick, you fathead, where are you?”
“Here,” he called from the floor beside the bed, as if it were only natural that he was splayed out on the Aubusson.
Charlotte tiptoed over and peered down at him. “Are you injured?”
“Of course not.” He sounded almost affronted.
“Then why are you on the floor?” He gave no response, so Charlotte nudged him with her toe. “Get up, Your Grace! You’re too big for me to lift.”
“Mmm.” Warrick seemed to like that idea. “P’haps you should come down here and try?”
Charlotte nudged him again, rather harder. A stickler might have called it a kick.
“Oh, to hell with you!” She turned to flounce back to her room, but one of Warrick’s enormous paws wrapped around her ankle. He gave the slightest tug and she tumbled down on top of him, making her squawk and Warrick say oof, sounding deeply pleased.
Before Charlotte could protest, he dragged her up his tangle of sheets and draped her over his chest, one of his hands busy working its way into her hair and the other stopping perilously close to her bottom.
“You see?” His voice was a deep rumble of satisfaction, like a tiger that had learned to purr. “Right where you belong.”
Charlotte took a deep breath and then another, inhaling something invitingly masculine under the sharp smell of vodka. But she managed to keep her wits and roll off him, sitting up and peeling his hand away. “You belong in bed.”
Warrick gave a sleepy smile. “With you? Yes, please.”
“In bed without me. Good Lord, it’s as if you were born to torment me.”
“Torment you?” Even in the darkness, with only the faint, faded light of the moon filtering in through the window, she could see his eyes go bleak. “I’m afraid I was born to adore you.”
That was such an irritating statement that Charlotte pushed herself to her feet.
“We’ve entered the maudlin portion of the evening, I see. Come on, get up! I can’t in good conscience leave you on the floor.”
But Warrick was in no mood to cooperate.
“Tried not to,” he mumbled. “But it’s no use—blackberry lips, upside-down smile. Frogs, so many frogs! I thought, Oh hell, there it goes.”
Charlotte’s lips parted.
Fairy tales were full of doors better off locked, and boxes best unopened. Warrick was spouting drunken nonsense, nothing more, and yet—
“There what goes?” she whispered.
His face screwed up, as if he were in pain. “My heart, of course. How many times do you intend to break it?”
Charlotte stood perfectly still, rather like a mouse exposed in a field with an owl closing in. If there was nowhere to run, why not greet death with silent dignity?
Of course, she wasn’t dying, although her heart had stopped and her knees threatened to unlock and send her crashing to the floor.
“Wolfgang…” Even a fool could tell that no good would come from interrogating a drunken man, and yet… “How can you say I broke your heart? You’re the one who—”
“Don’t throw yourself away on that damned Russian. He’s too unhappy—can’t you see? He drowns himself in pleasure. Find a man who makes you larger, one who wants you to be the most Charlotte.”
Charlotte stood speechless as the force of Warrick’s feelings pushed him up and he began slowly to rise.
The sheets slid down and pale light spilled over his naked chest, as if the moon itself were tracing silvery fingers along the thick slabs of muscle at his shoulders and down across his torso, and even lower still, to where a ladder of muscle led to his…
“Stop!” Charlotte cried, and he lowered himself back down obligingly, the sheet pooling at his waist as she pressed her hands to her burning cheeks. “Good God, aren’t you wearing any… nightclothes?”
Warrick closed an eye, thinking hard. “D’you know, I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps if I stand—”
“No! Stay right where you are!”
A little devil lived on her shoulder, and that statement woke him up. He peered over at the angel on her other shoulder, and they both gave a shrug and agreed. Oh, let him stand! What could it hurt to take a peek?
Warrick lurched to his feet.
Charlotte’s eyes dipped instinctively downward and widened. Oh good Lord. Gran had said the average was about five inches, but Warrick was much—
Warrick staggered and fell back against the bed, pulling her down with him.
Once again she found herself sprawled out across his chest, but this time there were no bedclothes between them. Her hands were full of bare male muscle begging for her inspection.
Warrick might look as if he were hewn from granite, but his skin was warm and alive.
She slid her hand up his flank. God, he felt like tight-woven silk.
Warrick growled his approval into her hair. “Christ, yes, touch me. I’ll die if you don’t.”
“You’re drunk!” she cried, as much to remind herself as to remind him. But it was hard to keep anything in her head when his hand tightened gently in her hair to tilt her neck back so he could lick his way down the length of it.
“Damn it, Charlotte.” He dragged his cheek along her collarbone, like a big cat marking her. “You light me up. You always have.”
Warrick turned with her in his arms, pressing her back against the mattress so he could trace the slopes and curves of her face with his thumbs. Just a minute more, Charlotte thought, her eyes fluttering closed. Just a minute more, and then I’ll leave.
He cupped her chin, dragged his hand down her throat as if he couldn’t stand to miss any part of her. Even drunk he was gentle, his fingertips skimming over her as if she were infinitely precious. She shivered in response and her traitorous heart galloped, each beat both pain and joy.
When his broad palm reached the edge of her pink dressing gown, his patience frayed and he pushed it aside roughly, bringing his mouth down to tease her nipple through the thin silk of her nightgown until Charlotte arched up into him and keened low in her throat.
Oh! Oh God!
“That’s right,” he said thickly, pulling her arms up around the hard muscles of his shoulders. “It’s me you want. No one but me.”
Charlotte dragged in a breath, trying desperately to get her brain functioning even as her insides melted. “Warrick, I—”
“Wolfgang.” He raised himself up to bite her bottom lip, dragging it slowly through his teeth. “Call me Wolfgang when you’re in my bed.”
Charlotte’s arms tightened around the heavy muscles of his neck and her nails worked their way into the thick scruff of his—
“No!” she cried.
The word had an instant effect. He let her go and she scrambled off the bed, her heart skittering round in frantic circles.
God, she wanted him, but he was drunk, and wrong for her.
Wolfgang meant too much confusion.
Too much hurt.
Too much danger entirely.
Charlotte ran helter-skelter out of his room and back to the safety of her bedchamber.